Doomed to Fail - Ep 81 - Responsible journalism? The Stephen Glass story

Episode Date: January 29, 2024

Should you believe everything you read? Today Farz tells the story of journalist Stephen Glass who made up a fantastic tale of hackers, data breaches, and early internet scare tactics!T/W Sexual Assault - This story was inspired by "You're Wrong About"'s reporting on The Duke Lacross Team case. We recommend checking out their episode - https://open.spotify.com/episode/41u0MLCM86ikQ4HPORsSJa  Join our Founders Club on Patreon to get ad-free episodes for life! patreon.com/DoomedtoFailPodWe would love to hear from you! Please follow along! Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/doomedtofailpod/  Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/doomedtofailpod  Youtube:  https://www.youtube.com/@doomedtofailpod TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@doomed.to.fail.pod Email: [e-mail] 

It's a matter of the people of the state of California versus Orenthal James Simpson, case number B.A.019. And so, my fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country. Boom. There we go. We are recording. I know we just turned off our video, but I'm going to turn mine on for a second. Because I have Girls Got Cook Cookies. I have them at my house now.

So I'm going to eat during, while you're talking, I'm going to eat one thin mint, one adventureful, and one peanut butter patty. And I'm very excited. And I will also put our QR code up on our Instagram because I have no shame. And if you're in the U.S., you can order cross-co cookies for my daughter and they will be delivered to your house. They are great. I always end up getting the box thing. I don't know what it is, but it's basically this beautiful, giant, very nicely-crafted box that they send you. and it comes with, I don't even know, like eight or ten different options in there.

It's actually a really, really good thing. And every year, that's what I get. And I love them and love donating or not donating. I mean, I'm getting something for my money, but. Supporting the girls. Supporting the girls, supporting the troops, supporting flow. And what do they get? Space Camp.

Is that what it is? Horse Camp. Horse Camp. Even better. Yep. So, yeah, she's going to go to horse camp by herself for a week over the summer, which is going to be heartbreaking for me. me, but fun for her. I'm sure. I'm sure it'll be an absolute blast. So cool. We're going to go

ahead and dive right in. I mentioned a Taylor. I'm on a little bit of an expedited schedule today. So you'll have to, you'll have to embrace the banter we have throughout this episode as opposed to banter in the beginning and end. But I do suspect there'll be some rich banter on this one, Taylor. So prepare yourself. All right. I'm ready. Okay. Wait, did you do an intro? I'm sorry. Oh, yeah. Sorry, this is due to fail. Thank you. I'm Fars. I'm joined for by Taylor. We are the co-hosts of this podcast, and we love producing for you, and hopefully

you all like listening to it. And, yeah, we'll go ahead and today I'm going to start things off, and before we go over to Taylor, I have, again, shifted the entire framework of what we are supposed to be talking about here, and I'm getting a little bit even more abstract with it. Obsessed. So, Taylor, I've mentioned to you that one of my favorite. podcast ever is you're wrong about right you've heard that name yeah did you see that i just posted on our instagram that one of my friends texted me and said we're filling the hole in her heart when

she stopped listening to you're wrong about why did she stop listening to it because michael left it's i don't i didn't ask but i feel like maybe so tell your friend this tell your friend so michael hobbs is um a seattle based journalist and reporter and he's absolutely incredible his hot takes on things are so my favorite to listen to ever and his He started, you're wrong about, with Sarah Marshall. Sarah Marshall's great as well, so no shade there. She still runs, you're wrong about. But Michael did move on to another podcast called, well, he moved on to several.

One is called Maintenance Base, so I don't like that one very much. So I'm not going to really plug that one. But tell your friend that if they are interested in more Michael Hobbs hot takes, his new podcast is called If Books Could Kill. books could kill it is co-hosted with this other um podcaster who now i'm obsessed with as well but they basically review books and talk about like what you know the one they just did on art of the deal is just so good it's so funny their hot cakes on Donald trump's perspective on things is just really really i've probably relistened that same episode four or five times the past two

weeks and that's high praise from someone who said several times that he doesn't read I know, you don't have to read because Michael breaks it down for you in an incredibly effective way So yeah, tell your friend If you're listening, check out that podcast Because you'll grow absolutely obsessed with that You'll care about books you didn't know existed

So amazing But the reason I bring it up is because Again, the kind of a recap of what you're wrong about It has to do with Again, the hosts are millennials Or around our age And they like to look at events That were instrumental to us

As we're growing up in our childhoods and come back and revisit them with a little bit more nuanced, more detail now that time has passed and kind of the media consumer consumption element of events can kind of die down a little bit. You can actually just purely look at the facts and they'll point out what we might have wrongly assumed about those events. Mostly, given that Sarah Marshall and Michael Hobbs are on the media side of things, they're mostly coming at from a perspective of an indictment on the media and the press. Because we get things wrong because the media has typically they have a greater interest in getting our attention than it does in later on going

back and correcting the public record. Once you sold the paper, you really don't necessarily care about going back and trying to say, oh, well, maybe we sensationalize something, right? So the host basically just go through and just dissect these moments and pick out parts of events that you probably didn't remember or forgot about. And every time I listen to an episode, I completely, I realized that I've completely forgotten and totally missed all the important details of major events that are part of our childhood in some way, shape, or form, which I always found really interesting. So this last one that I listened to, I re-listen to again. There's only like 60 podcasts or I've re-listened them like 100 times at this point. But the one that I just re-listened to that put me down the rabbit hole of the topic I'm discussing today had to do with the Duplic Ross case that happened when, Taylor, I think

you and I would have been in college. I think it was 2006, 7 somewhere around there. Mm-hmm. And they highlight a few key points about it. Obviously, the biggest problem with that case was. was that none of it was actually true. But despite it not being true, the case ended up gaining a significant amount of momentum and national media attention.

And the reason that you're wrong about highlights for that specifically is, first and foremost, you have an over-resales prosecutor and Mike Nyfong. And that's important because that piece feeds the piece that we're really talking about here, the second part of this, which is the media itself. So they obviously had an interest in revving this thing up, despite the lack of evidence, despite the lack of credibility, despite, once you, again, listen to the podcast, they'll break it down for you. And you're like, how did this ever reach the light of day? Like, it's shocking that something so obviously transparently not accurate or not true ended up becoming this national mailstorm, maelstrom.

But the biggest reason why that was was the media obviously had an intention in, trying to build up this case. And I'm going to get into the reasons for that why here in a second. Before I do, I want to start off by saying that I am going to do my episode as an indictment of the media and the press. But that being said, I'm so not a fake news guy. Like, I think that the vast majority of journalists are doing the right thing. And they're trying to further the public discourse by objectively reporting facts. But as with literally any other profession. There is some percentage that falls into this deviant behavior category that happens with anything. That happens with doctors, with, you know, lawyers. You name it. So I'm going to call

out some of this stuff, but it's not meant to be a overarching indictment of the press. So when public perception and media narrative kind of meet in a real world example, it's almost certain that we, the consumers of that media and the media itself come together to kind of form a hive mind, regardless of the truth of the narrative. That's really what the legacy of the Duke of the Cross case has been. And it's even more

interesting because once you revisit these things, you realize how obviously patently false they are. Are you going to talk about the details of that or other things? The details of the Duke case? Yeah. No, you're just going to... No, I mean, look,

there's so much content around the duclacross case that i don't even feel the need to like go like again everybody this has been poured over to death like there's nothing that hasn't been i mean mike nifong was disbarred like i mean people were like the the the woman who made the accusation she's in prison right now for murder first or secondary murder like like everything Like, the boys who were charged have moved on to becoming lawyers and whatever. Like, like, it is, it is so obviously, it was, I mean, the reason he was disbarred was because he literally had exonerating evidence on those kids and didn't report that out to the defendant's legal team.

And so that was the reason why he ultimately was disbarred because he literally had DNA evidence that would have been exculpatory for them. and he hit it. And so he was trying to get these kids convicted. He was like doing whatever he could. So anyway, I'm not going to go into the Duke of cross case. I'm using that as kind of the linchment of how I kind of started going down this rabbit hole because it touches on the second thing that I came across. Because they started with a dude case. I wanted the next one. And in 2014, some of you all may remember, I totally remember reading this case. In the Rolling Stones called, they published an article called A Rape on Campus. And I, I,

read it at the time in 2014 when it was released and I reread it again after I started going into the duplicate cross case and my first reaction to it was like how did any of us believe this shit like it was so obviously patently clearly made up it was about UVA it was again I can go into the details of folks want to use specifically Taylor want to ask questions about it because I reread this thing was like clearly this didn't happen like like you know It was so obvious, the over the topness of it was, was, was, so that article, a rape on campus, that was published by the Rolling Stone on November 19th of 2014. By 20, by November 24th, the most prominent journalists to first questions foracity, this guy named Richard Bradley was like, this is obviously bullshit. He wrote an article about this, about why it's bullshit.

And he also pointed out the fact that it was, there was other cases. that were very similar to this, except they were handled rights and they were handled well that you could have pointed to, but they pointed to this UVA case that couldn't be verified and all that stuff. And he kind of broke it down in terms of why you should be able to smell bullshit when you see it. So he broke it down into the hallmarks of bullshit being that it is outlandishly sensationalized. Or two, it plays into public perceptions of campus culture or the public zeitgeist. Three, the details are obscure for

reasons that on first glance would sound justifiable to the public, but a real journalist would know it's insufficient given the claims that were made in the story. And ultimately, that story was retracted a few months later. Rolling Stones issued a retraction. They apologized. Everybody got sued.

Lives were ruined people. It was, the impact of it was pretty dramatic. One thing that I was super pissed out about after I was like going into the details on this. So the author and the journalist who published that story, her name is Sabrina Elderly. She did get sued by the university president of UVA and she did get like a 2.2 million judgment against her or something along in those lines. But otherwise, like she's great.

Like she's still working. She has like multiple media empires that are just like, how is this like, okay. Anyways, whatever. So I bring in this Richard Bradley guy in this UVA case because Richard Bradley has a. unique level of insight into these things because he was the chief editor at George magazine in the 1990s and he fell victim to another famous fraudster, probably the most famous fraudster when it comes to journalistic ethics, a guy named Stephen Glass. Have you heard of this guy?

I don't know. I feel like maybe, but I don't know. Yeah, tell me. Yeah, that's our topic of discussion for today because, again, I went back reading this guy's articles and was like we believe this shit like i think like that's the that's my main takeaway but like going forward anytime i read something i'm just like there's this feels a little bit too sensational it's probably going to be bullshit and yeah that was like the the case with what was going on here so i'm going to go into a little bit about like what you know his life and what he did

and all that stuff and how the outcomes what the outcomes were but really it is this is one example of many So there's another example, Stephen Glass and a guy named Jason Blair had the distinction of being kind of the two top tier, like they just bullshitted their way through everything. They basically ruined the reputations of massive, massive institutions within our news media outlets. And so they need to be called out for that. But I'm going to focus on Stephen Glass in this one. So he is a former journalist who worked for the New Republic in 1998. Taylor, have you ever read The New Republic

or you familiar with that magazine? I don't think so. Okay. So the New Republic is a progressive-leaning political. It is political in nature and mostly left-leaning. It has a distinction of being kind of like the snobby magazine of the time.

Like they held themselves up to a pretty high standard. One thing that you'll see if you watch the movie that's based on this is that they gloat a lot that they're the only magazine. that is updated and kept on Air Force One. And so they hold themselves up to a pretty high standard and let everybody know that.

That's kind of the reputation. For the May 18th edition of the magazine, which actually gets released on May 6th. I don't know how magazines work and why that is, but that's... Yeah, it's always early. I don't know why. Yeah. So the New Republic published a story by Glass entitled Hack Heaven,

which told Glass's firsthand account of interacting with a particularly talented young guy. He's a 15-year-old, but, like, I mean, right now we would call him tech bros, but back then hackers was the thing. Like, it was like, everything was hackers. Yeah, you, like, believe that was possible. I know, I know. Like, there's like a dude at, like, a thing.

Oh, my God. Have you seen, have you seen hackers recently, the movie? No, not recently, you know. So I saw it, like, I don't know, in the past five years, but it's with Sandra Bullock, right? And in the beginning, she, like, hacks her. computer to be able to order a pizza and it's like hilarious and like mind boggling you know that she can do that it's really really funny yeah it's it's kind of the kensian what people think hackers are capable of doing and i'm going to kind of go into that here in a minute

maybe it's not hackers and look up sandra bullock while you're talking while you're on hold but you guys know what i'm talking so so it was it was swordfish was one it was so popular oh maybe i'm thinking of swordfish You might be thinking of a swordfish in Hallibary. No, I'm definitely thinking about Sandra Bullock, but anyway. The Net, maybe. The Net, I'm thinking of the net. Yeah, so like.

But yeah, totally. We didn't know what it was. We didn't know what it was. All those movies kind of came out at the same time this was going on. And, like, that gets into, like, kind of like the hallmarks of bullshit that we're going to get into here in a minute. But basically, I read the original story, Hack Heaven, and immediately the alarm bells were sounding off in my head of like this is obviously bullshit like what it reads like is how

is what every 70 year old thinks technology works or how they think it works the pertinent details that i broke down to three very simple bullet points are the story starts with a 15-year-old boy named ian wrestling sitting across from executives from a tech company based out of how alto called jukechronics micronics he's screaming to the executives about wanting a miata a trip to Disneyland, a Playboy magazine, he wants him to quote, show him the money. Nope, this is two years

after Jerry McGuire had come out. So stupid. Okay. So stupid. Well, the third bowl point is they're there because two months prior, Ian hacked, I use quotation marks, into Juke's database, and

publish the salary of all their employees on their home site along with some nude photographs of random women. Okay. So that right there, what I just read you is a synopsis of two paragraphs of this article, Hack Heaven. And almost immediately it was like, now you know it's bullshit, but it should have been clear to anybody that read this. So basically, these executives come to a visit Ian to offer him a job to fix their security issues

because he's so incredibly talented, this 15-year-old who can just do incredible things with just a keyboard and the mouse. and that's kind of what prompts his whole meada rant. I will say that first off, things like bug bounties are actually real. But a system that is designed like this where access to the admin panel of a website or CMS

to publish salaries on somehow also gets you into a third-party proprietary system where salary information HR data is kept, that would require so many companies failing the exact same time in the exact same ways and basic internet protocol. Right.

This wouldn't be connected. They wouldn't be connected. They have nothing to do with each other. I looked this up. There was two primary companies in 1998 that were responsible for managing payroll because the only options are either you do it yourself by hand on a ledger, which means it's not accessible by the internet, or you do it on a spreadsheet, which is local, which is not tied to the internet, or you do it through a third-party proprietary software company, one of the two

that I looked at that were still active in 1998, which again, how would you get into their systems? Like, how does getting into their systems have anything to do with you getting into a website, CMS, admin, they're not connected. Right. So the way, like, a typical bug bounty program works is that you discover something that basically shouldn't have happened and then you report it out and the company pays you out of much money. So a very simple example of this is learning that, like, oh, in a URL that might have like V3 in the string, you change it to v4 and then it gets you access as like a part of the site that we're supposed to be

hidden. We're supposed to be like direct access. Like it's stupid shit like that. Like it's not like I was able to like log into the NSA's website and like it doesn't happen. So. But like I understand it because like elderly people like always think that like like if I if I log into Amazon on my computer will they be able to see my bank account. It's like they're not tied to each other. Totally.

There's no connection. But especially in the 90s, I mean, we were trying to make it scary. Like, to your point. You know, the media is like trying to make it scary. Yeah. In this article, hack, I mean, Glass goes on to discuss how states are basically handling this and noting the difficulty and catching people like Ian,

because companies are just constantly offering them deals and instead of turning them in. So he brings up a uniform code. The U.S. has a ton of uniform codes. It's basically a way for like cross-commerce. or cross-state commerce communications with folks. So, like, for example, we have a unified code for contracts because you don't want a contract, you don't want, like, Texas's contracts to not look like Florida's contracts,

right? You need some uniformity there. And so there's a ton of these around, and what Loss is describing here has to do with a uniform code that would have this kind of cooperation to punish companies across states if they pay hackers instead of trying to report them. That's the idea of. He talks about these hackers basically pushing an agenda over their own via some sort of lobbying arm.

It sounds like complete utter bullshit. Glass puts himself in the pastor's seat for the hacker conference he attends. And he attends us with Ian and he paints his picture of everyone at this conference, basically high-fiving Ian, talking about how amazing he is. This paragraph also quotes the mom saying how proud. out of him she is. So I guess his mom was also in attendance while he's basically praising this kid. And at the end of it,

they announced that Ian will be getting an $81,000 payout along with some high value comic books. And Ian's bragging about how just before he showed up to this event, he'd actually frozen the bank accounts of a major company. And everybody just starts cheering. And like, that's how the story ends. So stupid. It's so, it's like cringe.

It's like weird. It's like, I can feel the hair standing up. So like, I also feel like, so, you know, when you started talking, you know, It's definitely, like, the examples that you have about, like, sexual assault, you know, there's tons about, you know, we need to believe people when they say that that's something bad happened to them, you know, and we need to, like, you know, do the due diligence, but it's definitely, you know, you, it's part of the media's responsibility to not, like, accuse people who have not been, you know, tried in a court. You know what I mean? well the sexual assault example is literally the corollary to this in our modern times as the internet was when swordfish was coming out right like yeah like there's a thing that happens in the public sentiment and then anything that is a bias towards affirmation of that thing it is right for the media to sensationalize and build up beyond it despite that they're being evidence or not. Yeah. Well, I think it's, it's, it's, you know, a big deal to, to, you know, today because of what happened this week with Trump and E. Jean Carroll, you know, and I saw something like some, like the New Yorker posted, we posted a, a, uh, a cover that they had her on it. And

people in the comments were like, she's a liar, you know, over and over again. I was just like, this is so gross, you know? It's been like, proven in court, like, stop it. So. Yeah, yeah. It's never going to go. So here's the thing. There's some things that seem to persist, and there are other things that are snapshots on time. As I was like researching all this, I also completely forgot about the insane sensationalization in the media firing off on Valerie Plame and her husband, Joe Wilson. Do you remember this? No. Right after, in the run-up to the Iraq War, so like right after this stuff, there was. we're talking about here. The public sensationalization shifted from the internet culture to the Iraq war in September 11th. And it was under the auspices of that, that at the time, Sveira Libby, later was the turn to be Richard Armitage, released publicly the information that

Valerie Plain was an undercover CIA operative because they were trying to get back to her husband who published an article that he went to Nigeria and realized that Iraq was not trying to buy yellow cake uranium like it was a whole thing and then

and all of a sudden you have this couple in Washington, D.C. who were just basically living their lives and like now or in the center of this national

like So you're right that destroys lives. Yeah, yeah. Stuff like this destroys lives and like it's like the incentive structures

aren't well along The incentive structure is there's a lot of buzz happening about a certain topic in a moment. Let's grab anything we can that has to do with that topic. The sexual assault thing's really interesting because Richard Bradley actually pointed out that if that person, what's her name, Sabrina, whatever, the one who wrote the UVA story, the Rolling Stone one, if she wanted to, she could have literally done almost that story in real life because a few years prior to the story that she made up. up there for the UVA case, there was the exact same assault story for Vanderbilt with like two or three college football, like football players who were charged and arrested. But the reason they all that happened was because it was immediately reported. The student body took immediate action.

The administration took immediate action. Like everybody acted right. You know, like, like that wasn't a story that was trying to be told. The story that was trying to be told was like, this happens. Nobody does the right thing. It's all, that's why people like the university president filed lawsuits because they were like, you lie. Like, none of this happened and your implication about what we did or didn't do wasn't true. Totally.

So I'm going to get, going back to the story, the Stephen Glass piece of this, if you all want, like the story itself is actually only two pages long. It's super easy to digest. Just Google the word hack heaven, Stephen Glass original. and there's a website, the sub-domain, it's like wp.lps.org, and it'll come up. Like, it's very simple to find. It'll take, like, 10 minutes to read it. It's worth to read because you'll see how insane it is. Yeah.

You can actually read it. How stupid it sounds, yeah. Right, right. So, and again, like, kind of what I referred to earlier, like, this kind of captures kind of the public perception of the time. Like, the Internet's gaining traction. Kids are getting rich. Everything seems insecure.

like I don't I don't get what it's going on but everybody's on it like it's a real strange nebulous universe of the economy that nobody really totally understands I think that's what drew this author Stephen Glass to kind of sensationalize it and try to capitalize on it so I feel like um there's also like I remember the first time I saw someone like blatantly lying like on my space you know and I was like oh my god people lie on here you know like obviously I know that now but like then I was like someone was like oh I like designed this dress and it was obviously dressed like I'd seen somebody else I knew they hadn't done it and I was like oh people lie here you know that's scary and weird I know I love the ones the the memes you see where somebody gets

like offended at something online and then the next post is like it is your first day on the internet yeah exactly but by first day on the internet it's weird yeah yeah and I'm gonna I'm gonna get to a lot of the whying piece of this is like the most fascinating piece of this because it plays in like a psychology that I came and began to understand so the story gets published and it's huge it's like really widely praised like at the time it was like it was just like all these other stories I just mentioned you're looking like whoa that's this is like crazy like you just you we learn about like these kids who can do this stuff we learn there's a hackers association an advocacy group a conference. We learned that companies are

shelling big money. We know there's a uniform code. Like, this is a lot of stuff that's coming out on this. And so people were pretty interested in it, except there was one competing reporter who read the story and was like, this sounds like bullshit.

So, in 1988, Forbes Digital Arm was called Forbes Digital Tool. That was like the their kind of credit as being like the first internet magazine or internet journalist or whatever, whatever. you want to call it before then like and you don't get a lot of credibility for that right like the old time magazines and newspapers that's like where real journalism is done and so Forbes was

trying trying this out and at a time it was like we don't really we're not really it's not really reputable not like the new republic it was nothing like their new republic reputation wise so they were basically the equivalent the modern equivalent of like I would say CNET and tech crunch but now those are basically just places to go see advertisements for things that they want to sell you instead of, like, actual news. But in the old days, like, that's kind of what it would have been. And as a result, it means that, like, they are primarily focused on tech news, right? Like, that's kind of like their wheelhouse, kind of like those other organizations.

They looked at this article, and they deduced several things. They looked at it and said, okay, so you have legislation being contemplated by 21 states to address digital security. there's a hackers lobby somewhere there's a conference that they all get to together and they also bring along with them some of the highest earning people out of Silicon Valley as the executives

to kind of award prizes and hire the most as our kids basically. That's talented. Sable sounds gross in that context. So a journalist from Forbes named Adam Penningberg started digging into this and starts finding some irregularities. He starts looking into it

and looking at it from the perspective like I'm a tech journalist like all I do is this stuff like he's just like how on earth have I never heard of any of this and then you have like the number one political magazine in the country that knows this stuff like how's it even possible right why don't I know yeah exactly it was almost like shocked the so there's a movie about this and I'm referenced later and the way it looks is that his editor Adam's editor says why didn't you get this story like how on earth did these guys get this story and you didn't and I think that was kind of the first point when he was like it has to be bullshit.

Like, I've had those moments before where somebody says, like, why didn't you do this thing? I was like, if I didn't do it first, it was probably bullshit. Oh, my God, totally. You probably can't be done. Totally. So he starts by learning that Juke's Micronix has no digital presence or registration with the California franchise tax board. The only result returned for Juke's using Alexis X's search was literally just that article

by the New Republic. At a later date, they do discover a website, and it's hilarious. You can actually find this website. If you do a search for it, there's an image that you can pull up of it. And it's basically just pure HTML. And also, it is hosted on a server that is only accessible to AOL members. So it's almost like a geo-city's kind of a site or like a Facebook. Like, imagine like a business running just on Facebook.

It's kind of like what it was. Nobody at the conference that is basically a conference that enforces uniform state laws heard of any sort of new code being proposed for digital internet security and nobody could unearth any information about the existence of this hackers convention or any sort of advocacy or association of hackers. So...

Why don't you also be like that's on purpose because they're mysterious? Does he say that? But his... But the why we read the article? Yeah, but his point is like, if anybody would have known about this, it's me.

Like, if I never heard of it, then it's impossible that this guy who, like, before then, if you read his content, which we're going to get to later on, it's all political on nature. Like, his last article, which turned out to be another one of the ones that ends up being complete bullshit. God, what was it called? It was called Spring Breakdown. It had to do with last attending the RNC convention and then going up to the hotel rooms of some of the staffers of the RNC and just like. like he was talking about hookers and drugs and just all this crazy stuff happening, which, like, probably has happened. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But, like, he didn't witness any of it. He just, he just, like, thought it would be a good story. And we're going to later learn that's one of the stories that ended up being totally false. But that's his background. His background is that kind of stuff. It's political, not like this stuff. So Adam Pendenberg, he goes to editor-in-chief at the New Republic. public. His name is Charles Lane. He goes by Chuck. And he starts asking a bunch of questions. He asks

for fact checks on certain details. His take on it was Duke doesn't exist. There was no conference of hackers. There's no uniform code that is we're aware of anybody has heard of. And the people you cite in the article don't seem to exist. They actually looked at this Ian wrestling kid and we're like, there's no record of him in any public school, which I don't know how you even do that search but like they did that search they also referenced like his agent is a random guy that was in attendance like apparently hackers have agents according to glass and they could never find that guy either there's a whole host of issues with this but yeah so this is kind of when chuck starts getting a little bit suspicious and it's worth noting that at a time glass was incredibly

well respected um not just at the new republic but he was also he was a freelancer with rolling stone with harper with george he was a contributor to the npr or not be but two NPR. And in a lot of ways, you know, what I looked at when I, when you see how he kind of describes this kid, Ian, is it's kind of how he would describe himself. He was 24 years old at the time, young, up and coming. He was very popular. Like, he was just like, he kind of was the show, show me the money kind of a guy in his own, in his own little universe. Oh my God. I already forgot about that, but that's also so stupid. So stupid. I know. I had to do a search. I was like, wait, the article came out. When did Jeremy McCart come on. Come on. Come on.

So despite all that, Chuck, his editor, decides to go through with the story with Glass using a fine-tooth comb and figure out what might these issues be that the Forbes journalist is kind of calling out. He asked Glass for all of his sources, which are all self-reported, which is really important. And Glass provides to him basically all the details that he asked for, the numbers of people, the addresses, all this stuff, including the information of the executive at Juke Micronics, who is the one who basically tells him he can get him whatever he wants, get this EN to whatever he wants. Later on, that guy, the Juke's executive basically calls back Chuck and yells him and tells him what pissy you for publishing the story. Just never talk to me again, whatever. And then when Chuck reaches out to this kid, Ian, via email, the kid also replies angrily saying, don't ever contact him again. This story was embarrassing. Basically, that's all the years back from these sources. The Forbes journalists start pointing out the weirdness of all this. And as they do, Chuck grows more and more suspicious. Every ask from Glass for confirmation of something was met with, it's in my notes.

That was it. You just say, it's in my notes. I'll find it. It's in my notes, which means he was going home and writing it in his notes to come back the next day and give him the notes. Look, I read the sound. It's all real because I wrote it down. Eventually, this is, oh, man.

So eventually, Chuck tells Glass. that they're going to go to Bethesda, Maryland, which is where he says the Hacker Conference took place. They're, like I said, there's a movie starring Peter Sarsgaard as Chuck and Hating Christensen as Glass, and they both do unbelievably good jobs of this in this movie. And this scene is one of the most tense. The scene where they go to the hotel is one of the most tense I've ever seen an entire movie.

You want to start ripping your nails out watching it. It's one of the most underrated scenes. I think in movie history. It's actually free right now on Amazon Prime. If you have Amazon Prime video, go check it out. It's called Shattered Glass. Man, it is a steady buildup to this point

where you just want to start ripping your hair out. When you see them in this hotel and you realize what's going on, the tension lasts like 10 minutes. And it's just like you won't, you won't breathe. You won't talk to anybody. You won't breathe. Just like we stare at the screen.

It's so good. So in real life and the movie, They jump in, Glass's car, and he drives them to a random hotel in Bethes to Maryland. He'd never been to this hotel. He just sees a hotel. He pulls in and says, this is where the conference was. They go up to the conference space. And in the article, Glass said the conference took place on a Sunday night, weird, which is really weird.

Like, man, that's a weird lie. Yeah, that's weird. That would never, yeah. That would never happen. It would never happen. It's like, at least you get better at lying. I think. I don't know. So they get up the space it's Sunday and Chuck asked an employee about like whether he remembers a few weeks back at conference happening. And this employee tells

him like, no, couldn't have happened. The event space is closed on Sundays. And then, I mean, again, like in the movie glasses like, I was here. I know I was here. Like you know, it just keeps, oh, it's so tense. So good. So he, so Chuck is like obvious like super pissed off at this point. this is becoming more and more obvious bullshit. It's like, tell, tell me where the juke executives and Ian went to discuss this deal. He's like, it's a restaurant across street. We went there for dinner. And so he walks across the street, finds a random restaurant.

Like, yep, that's the one. As they walk up, they see a sign on the door saying that the restaurant is closed after three on Sundays. And so that's kind of like when it starts. Do any research before you start lying. Yeah, seriously. it's like you just at least you get to trace your steps a little bit yeah so it was shortly after all this that chuck also learns that the person from juked who called him angrily was actually last his brother i yeah i try to dig up any info on how he actually pieced that together the movie makes it

seem as though peter sars guard character kind of pieced together with random info like somebody mentioned that the business was in Palo Alto. Somebody else mentioned that Glass's brother went to Stanford. It was one of those. It's not super clear. And I couldn't find any facts on how they pieced it together, but they did. So with all that knowledge, Chuck fires him. And he goes to the reporters in the newsroom to tell him why he was doing this.

And by this point, they all basically had agreed that it was obvious he was lying and that they needed to start sifting through all the other magazines and the other articles that he'd written to figure out what was what, what was true and what wasn't. Ultimately, they retract 27 of 41 of his articles, and those are just the ones that they know for sure are fabricated. The other 14 could have been fabricated, too, but they couldn't confirm it. He also wrote, like I said, for George Harper and Rolling Stones, and they also had to issue retractions. It's interesting because the one from Harper's was the first retraction they'd issued in 165 years. It's kind of wild.

Yeah, it's wild. Glass ultimately ends up telling his story in a Vanity Fair article, and it's called Shattered Glass, same as the film, and he basically is like, I'm sorry, I was being like, I was, you know, like, he basically just apologizes, like, he just,

what his argument was, was when he was, one of the earlier articles that he worked on, he tried to make it a little more sensational, and he made something up, and people were responded well to it. He was like, well, then I just realized if I just, like, kept doing this and people were going to like my stuff for him. He just kept doing it. Oh my God, like, write books.

Yeah, which he did. He wrote a book called The Fabulous, actually, which is literally a story about a journalist who just fakes articles. But he did it after, though, right? He did it after, yeah. Okay, good. I'm like, that would have been all too much, all too on the nose. Yeah, yeah. So since then, he obviously is no longer hireable as a journalist. And he was already in law school in Georgetown when all this kind of started coming out.

One thing to know about being a lawyer is before you take any exam to actually pass a bar exam, you take a character and fitness evaluation. So you have to submit all your information to the state bar that you want to practice in. They have to determine whether you have the required fitness to be a lawyer, primarily not doing anything that has deception as part of its background. So anybody who's committed any sort of fraud or acts with dishonesty that are criminal in nature, they never get licensed. that sounds good i like that yeah yeah and so in this case this wasn't actually a crime but he still can't get barred so he's as of the last time he tried to submit his application for licensure to the supreme court of california was 2014 and as of that time the supreme court came back and was like nope so i'm not going to license you and so he by all accounts just

kind of works like a clerk like a law clerk um in california he lives in west hollywood apparently. And that's kind of been his destiny since. I mean, he made this mistake when he was 24 years old in 1998. That was what, like 27 years ago. And he's still kind of like this unemployable fucking nobody, basically. Yeah, it's like a life ruiner. But the main thing that, like, again, there's so many of these stories that I looked up, if you look up like the most proxulent journalist, again, generally speaking, journalists are trying to do the right thing. this type of behavior is incredibly deviant like bottom 1% of human beings do this type of shit but if you read something and it seems outlandish it's probably not true yeah just like use your

judgment you know like do other sources as well you know and and I and I definitely feel like I feel the media is so crazy right now and everyone's so mad at each other and everything is so like you know this and this and this and it's just like a terrible place right now and There's people who, like, you know, only watch the, this, you know, news is very, very harmful. All sorts of weird shit's happening. Right. You know, and like, that's a good reminder to be like, you know, you can live in your bubble and, you know, bad. Yeah.

Yeah. So, you know, you should, you know, whatever. Yeah. Just, just, nothing is 100% true one way or the other. Just use your own judgment, essentially. but yeah that's my story today taylor thanks for rushing through this with me i got to hop and run but we'll go ahead and give some shout out for our um email please write to us at duneafel pod or reach out to us via the socials at duneafel pod is there anything though you want to lead us off

with taylor um oh i just want to say my friend that i mentioned earlier um she just started listening and it was really fun she sent me a much of text messages she'll send to like six bus hoots yesterday. She was like, I'm going through my emails, and I saw your email, and I started to listen, and she really liked it. So thank you to, so Morgan. And, yeah, like, when it's really exciting when people, like, pick it up, and they're like, oh, no, I really like this. So I appreciate it. Love it. Thank you. Thanks for listening, and we will be back in a few days with our next episode. Thanks, Fars. Awesome. Thanks, thanks, Taylor. Let me go ahead and cut it off.

Thank you.